High engagement rates and increased reach characterizes any topic that makes it to the top of social media trends. Therefore, whether you own a business or at least want to market a product, you must have thought to make use of the existing trend to guarantee wider reach of your content. But, is any social media trend enough to guarantee the success of your campaign? Is it a blueprint that your business will appeal to its target customers? And how to make good use of the trend for business marketing purposes?
“The game of marketing can have no rules but borderlines inside which we can give space to creative use of surrounding trends”, according to Gamal El-Feky, business consultant and digital marketing instructor, who added that in order for a business to pick a social media trend that can appeal to its audience and achieve the marketing objectives, some steps shall be followed.
1. Know your persona
In order for any business or product to continue doing customer satisfactions is to have a continuously updated knowledge of its audience needs, problems and pain points as well as understanding the potential customers hassles, according to El-Feky. This is easily achieved through regular surveys or polls.
This enables any business to use the data gathered to achieve better understanding of the audience’s taste through their demographics, the type of problems or compliments they usually submit and thus be able to grasp what social media trends they tend to find interesting.
2. Study the past trends
“There is no better predictor of the future than the past” said El-Feky. Before deciding on a social media trend to use for building a business concept, you need to understand your audience attitudes for the past 2 months like who interacted with similar trends in the past, to which category of users these appealed, who found them interesting to take a decision based upon not only reshare.
The findings will help make your audience predictable and consequently, identify the criteria of the future trend you can label as “suitable” to build a marketing strategy based on and minimize your choices of new trending topics.
3. Tools are there for help
Now that your list of social media trends is narrowed down, you need to understand each of the current trends before deciding on using it, El-Feky mentioned. Tools exist for this reason, where you can pick some hashtag from twitter and insert it to know how different users interacted with it or get up-to-date information of the hourly trending topics on Instagram or Twitter. Examples of useful tools to know the trend hourly and check hashtags geographical information are “Hashtagify.me” and “Trends24.in”.
4. Tone of voice
El-Feky mentioned that in order for a social media trend to be defined as “suitable” for the brand or marketing objectives of a company, it must have the same tone of voice in which this company addresses its consumers or at least correlates with it. This means that if the brand adopts a certain style in communicating a message to their audience which can be formal, friendly or adopt a certain sense of humor, the trend must be on the same track. For instance, in managing the marketing plan and strategies of a governmental sports club the tone of voice is semi-formal. Consequently, the trends of pop or local music would not be a perfect choice to use.
When is a social media trend useless?
In some cases using the most social media trending topic to promote your content can derive a negative impact on your business. According Ahmed Nagy, CEO of a business counselling company. “Some businesses like real estate should be cautious when using a trend or avoid it all”.
Nagy explained that most social media trends in Egypt are entertainment-based. Therefore, their use to build upon informative campaigns like that of real estate could be misleading or at least not appealing to the target audience who might be businessmen who are not good followers of social media trends. So, the message for them will be puzzling and lose the informative nature that it should have.
“If you want to make use of the social media trend for your business nothing can stop you unless the trend is irrelevant to your objectives” according to Nouran Nour, account manager and social media specialist. The type of the trend which suits a certain account may not suit another. For instance, utilizing a movie quote trend to construct a social media campaign of an engineering company may not be the best choice yet it can appeal in promoting some lifestyle business.
Nour mentioned that “Relevance is the key word here” where no business is unwelcoming of the use of social media trends but picking an irrelevant trend to the type of business and its target audience can have a destructive effect on both the product or message you seek promoting as well as the business as a whole. In such case, the use of social media trend could be useless.
“The audience will always be a loyal detector” Nour added. Whenever you are confused about whether or not some trend can help in achieving your marketing and promotional objectives, “imagine you are one of the audience and be in their shoes for a while”. This approach helps to draw an imaginary scene of your audience’s life based on the demographic givens you have and consequently, be able to identify the potential feedback.
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